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Re: OS Market Shares

On Jun 1, 11:21 am, bbgruff <bbgr...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Latest Net application figures:-
> http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=9

I went to the site, it looks like a very flawed survey, but they don't
show the methodology they used.  I've seen similar surveys and the
methodologies used were very "Windows centric".

Only count whatever is in the first entry of the browser Identity.
Linux browsers usually have X11 as the first entry and don't include
the word Linux until almost the end of the entry.  These are semicolon
delimited fields, and so it's easy to "not count" Linux.

Any values you don't recognize - assume that they are not browsers and
throw them out (90% of this "other" category is Linux workstations
running Firefox, Konqueror, or Mozilla.

Only count one OS per IP, and let Windows "override" Linux entries.

Use activeX controls or other Windows specific elements before the
count.  The result is that the browser can't send back the
information, or the browser is disqualified because it doesn't support
functions such as PDF or Flash or ActiveX.

> Over the past 10 months:-
> Windows:  From 93.28% to 91.13% of User base
> Mac:  From 5.99% to 7.83% of User base
> Linux:  From 0.46% to 0.68% of User base

If we figure that 1% is roughly 10 million users, that would indicate
that even with this screwy survey, Linux grew from 4.6 million to 6.8
million users - an increase of  2.2 million users.

> Hence, that puts Market Shares (meaning "% of new machines sold with" - and
> perhaps a bit conceptual re. LinuX) at about:-
>
> Windows:  81%
> Mac:  17%
> Linux: 1.7%

Here is another survey that is also flawed, but less flawed than the
one above.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
Windows XP 73.3%
Windows 2000 3.3%
Win98  .05%
Vista 8.8%
W2003 1.9%
Linux 3.7%
Mac at 4.6%
And "other" = 3.9%

That would put Linux at Roughly 76 million users.

Vista seems to gave gone up to 88 million users (even though 200
million PCs were sold this year).

Keep in mind that this survey, like the other, only counts IP
addresses, not cookies, and therefore miscounts corporate desktop and
laptop machines as well as ISPs who use NAT routing.  Most Linux users
are behind NAT firewalls (because they tend to be more security
conscious)..  Microsoft can skew IP surveys in it's favor by
increasing the number of IP addresses used it it's DHCP pool, this
includes users who come in via MSN, AOL, and cellular modems, which
has been increasing the number of users.

> For Mac to be so high (and for that matter, Linux so low), I can only think
> that the Net applications sampling is very biased towards U.S, sites - an
> observation which is borne out by their browser stats.

Not just US based, but probably a very limited demographic base, based
on Microsoft oriented content.  I don't know if this is the case or
not, but I do remember a similar survey that was only supported on
Windows servers and required a front page extension to actually get
the "counter" to work.  There could have been millions of users
hitting the site but didn't get counted because they were using Linux
and "bounced off".






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